Ghost Stories

THE NUMBER ONE INTERNATIONAL BESTSELLER

The tender memoir of the forty-three years Siri Hustvedt spent with her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster - from their first encounter in 1980s New York through the highs and lows of love, family and grief
'A beautifully moving story... we defy you to read the deathbed scene without tearing up'
SUNDAY TIMES, Summer reading: best memoir

'Sorrowful, tender, candid, even funny, Ghost Stories is a book about death that brims with life, in all its misery and joy'
DAILY MAIL

'I was bowled over by Siri Hustvedt's Ghost Stories, a gorgeous, poignant memoir of her life with Paul Auster, written in the rawness of the wake of his death'
SARAH WATERS, GUARDIAN, Summer reading

'The delight to be found in Hustvedt's book arises because so much of the landscape revealed is one of love. It will console you for the losses you have suffered, and for the ones you know - we all know - are yet to come'
OBSERVER 'A profound and forthright meditation on love and loss, unique in our literature'
INDEPENDENT

'Genuinely moving...Hustvedt's book is like Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking in tone...a grainy and resonant book about loneliness, despair, and confusion. It's close to a howl'
NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW

Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a searing and intimate meditation on grief, memory and enduring love, written in the aftermath of the death of her husband, writer, poet and filmmaker Paul Auster. It is a patchwork-quilt book that stitches together memories from over forty years of love and life together: journal entries Siri wrote between November 2023 and 3 May 2024, the day of Paul's funeral; emails Siri sent to friends during his cancer treatment; notes Paul sent her over the course of their relationship; and three love letters Siri wrote to him in 1981, when he left her for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life with his first wife and son. The book also contains Paul Auster's last ever piece of writing - the first thirty-five pages of what he hoped would be a small book of letters to Siri's and his grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, born on 1 January 2024. Unflinching, tender and wise, this is the full-bodied story of Siri Hustvedt and Paul Auster's life together, an exploration of how grief unmoors time and how the intimacy of a shared life continues to mark the everyday. 'A remarkable achievement'
LOUISE KENNEDY 'What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love'
DAVID MITCHELL 'Essential reading from an all-time great'
SARA COLLINS A note from Siri
'I began writing Ghost Stories shortly after my husband, Paul Auster, died on April 30th 2024. My meditations on Paul's cancer, his death, my grief, the potent feeling I had of his presence on the day he was buried, and my memories from the years we spent together are interwoven with several texts that were written before he died: twelve letters I wrote to friends during his cancer treatment; journal entries I wrote between early November, 2023 and May 3, 2024; and three love letters I wrote to Paul in 1981, when he left me for a period of nine or ten days to return to his former life. Although I knew Paul had saved those letters, I hadn't read them since they were written and had only a foggy recollection of their content. In the last month of his life, Paul began writing what he hoped would be a small book of letters to our grandson, Miles Auster Hustvedt Ostrander, who was born on January 1st, 2024. Paul was too weak to finish it as planned, but the thirty-five pages he did manage to write are interwoven in this book. I want to stress that Paul's text is not an appendix to mine but an integral part of the book as a whole. Because the memoir turns on attachment, betweenness, and dialogue, all crucial to the love affair that lasted forty-three years, the insertion of one author's text into another's, is, in this case, essential to the memoir's overall meaning.' Praise for Siri Hustvedt
'Hustvedt is that rare artist, a writer of high intelligence, profound sensuality and a less easily definable capacity for which the only word I can find is wisdom'
Salman Rushdie

'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear'
Hilary Mantel 'She's a twenty-first-century Virginia Woolf, with many intellectual and creative rooms of her own'
Literary Review

Siri Hustvedt is the author of seven novels, five collections of essays, a poetry collection and a memoir. Her books have been listed for major prizes, including the Booker Prize, the Women's Prize and the PEN America Literary Award. She holds a PhD from Columbia University and has been awarded honorary PhDs from Johannes Gutenberg University, Stendhal University and the University of Oslo. She is a Lecturer in Psychiatry at Weill Cornell Medical College and has written on art for the New York Times and the Daily Telegraph. Born in Minnesota, she lives in Brooklyn, New York.